When I was a kid watching Sesame Street I fell in love with the sketch where Smokey Robinson sang “U Really Got a Hold on Me” while the letter U put the squeeze on him. All these years later whenever I hear the Miracles sing “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me”, I still picture Smokey Robinson being pursued by a giant letter U. Lately, I have been thinking about the first line of that song quite a lot. It starts with a rather shocking confession…”I don’t like you, but I love you”. When you read the full lyrics of the song you get a picture of a very unhealthy relationship but that’s not my point so I digress.

The Bible has a lot to say about love. There’s a lot about how God loves us and, over the past few years, I have heard many voices spending a great deal of time on the topic of God’s love. It took Google less than a second to return over 3 billion results when I searched “the love of God” and over 2 billion for “how God loves”. The love that we aren’t talking about quite as much is how we, the sons and daughters of God are supposed to love. When I looked up “how Christians should love” there were still a lot of results but only 1.9% as many as how God loves. It is critically important for us to know that God loves us. The knowledge that God loves us is what has drawn most of us into the family of God. To find out the Creator of all things knows you, warts and all, and loves you, is a life-giving revelation for which there is no equal. The problem with this disparity around how much we talk about God’s love and how much we talk about our love is that many of us have stopped at knowing we are loved. If the entire point of a relationship with Jesus was merely discovering that we are loved and transitioning from being a creation of God to a member of His family, wouldn’t it make sense for salvation to be immediately followed by passage into eternity. It would be cool! Imagine you have the revelation that God loves you, you repent of your sins and then are swept up to heaven in a flaming chariot a la Elijah; or you discover the intense, sacrificial love of Jesus, repent of your sins and then, like Enoch, you just disappear (Genesis 5:24 tells us Enoch walked with God; then he was not there because God took him). Tada…saved, instantly delivered into Paradise, eternal happily ever after. However, this is not the full intention of God’s love for us. Love is a multiplier. Love is meant to reproduce. That’s part of our responsibility as Christians (little Christs, little anointed ones) we are meant to reproduce the love that has been given to us by loving the same way we are loved.

Here’s a very quick look at how we are loved: 1 John 4:8 tells us that His love is perfect and expels fear, Romans 8:35-39 tells us that His love is secure and that nothing can separate us from that love, Ephesians 3:18-19 tells us that His love is so immense that we will never be able to fully understand the greatness of that love, Psalm 5:11-12 calls His love a shield in which we can take refuge, Psalm 36:5-7 tells us that His love is unfailing, Psalm 86:15 calls His love faithful and declares God to be full of compassion, mercy and patience, 1 John 3:1 calls us children of God because He has lavished His love on us, Ephesians 2:4 tells us that even though we were dead in sin, He made us alive with Christ because of His great love for us. These verses only scratch the surface of how He loves us.

Here’s a quick look at how we’re supposed to love: In John 13:34 Jesus tells us that we are supposed to love one another the same way he has loved us (just a quick reminder Jesus sacrificed himself to show his love for us, so you know big shoes to fill and whatnot!), 1 John 4:19-21 tells us that if we say we love God but hate our brother we are liars, because if we can’t love our brothers who we’ve seen we cannot love God who we’ve never seen, 1 John 3:16-18 tells us that we understand what love is because we know Jesus laid down his life for us, so we should be willing to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters, we have to love with actions and truth, not just with words, Romans 12:10 says that we should love deeply and outdo one another in showing honor, Ephesians 4:32 instructs us to treat each other with kindness, compassion and forgiveness, Proverbs 17:17 tells us that we should love at all times, 1 Peter 1:22 lets us know we should love earnestly from a pure heart, John 13:35 tells us that the way people will know we are followers of Jesus is if we have love for each other. If the last few years are any indication, the little anointed ones have become very hard to identify. It can seem that in order to love each other we have to be the same in all things; beliefs, opinions, tastes and styles. We seem to have decided that in order to love each other we have to like each other and this brings me back to Smokey Robinson.

I Don’t Like You, But I Love You

Many moons ago, when I was a young, idealistic youth leader with my theology degree in hand, I set out to make an impact on the young lives entrusted to me. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were some of the youths that were challenging to appreciate.

I was telling my dad that I felt like a failure because I should adore all of the kids when he spoke some of the most freeing words I have ever heard. He said “Baby doll, you don’t have to like everyone, you just have to love them.” Mind blown! I don’t have to like everyone. Well of course not. There are some genuinely unlikeable people in the world. Odds are pretty good that there are people who think I’m a genuinely unlikeable person (believe me I get it). Even Jesus seems to have found some people unlikeable, or at least found their behavior unlikeable. We see him challenging and calling out Sadducees and Pharisees throughout his earthly ministry. We find Jesus having a discussion with Nicodemus, a Pharisee in John 3. I find it incredibly powerful that it is to a Pharisee that Jesus speaks John 3:16, one of the very first verses that most of us learn. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. This cornerstone verse about the love of God and the life saving gift of Jesus Christ is given to a member of one of the groups that Jesus referred to as hypocrites and broods of vipers, love poured out on the unlikeable. In John 19 we see this viperous hypocrite, this same Nicodemus, coming after the crucifixion to help prepare Jesus’ body for burial. In a moment when many of the disciples were nowhere to be found, this unlikeable man was risking his reputation to honor Jesus. What a beautiful picture of how love moves.

In Mark 12 a scribe asks Jesus which of the commandments is the most important and Jesus distills everything into two points. First, in Mark 12:30, he says “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Secondly, in verse 31, Jesus says “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” In Matthew 7:12 Jesus gives additional insight into how we love others when he says “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” Over time this has come to be called the Golden Rule, the gold standard for how we should treat each other. We are to put all we have into loving God and, out of that love, flows love to those around us. Dr. Michael W. Waters put it so beautifully in the documentary “Juneteenth: Faith & Freedom”, he said “I think you can be distant from movement where you’ve not fully embraced the command of God to love your neighbor as yourself. When you love your neighbor as yourself, that’s not just a child over there that’s hurt, that’s my child. That’s not just a community over there that’s ostracized, that’s my community. You feel the pain through proximity.” In Genesis 1:27 we are told that humanity was created in the image of God. Like a piece of pottery bearing the fingerprint of the potter, every person that you meet bears the image of God, regardless of whether or not they acknowledge Him! Every person is not a child of God, sonship is reserved for those who are in relationship with Him through the redeeming power of Jesus, but that sonship, that adoption into the family of God, is available to everyone. Lately I have been wondering how these not-yet-adopted image-bearers are going to see Jesus. I can’t think of a single day in the past few years where I haven’t seen Christians completely forgetting that our love for each other is the way that other image-bearers will recognize that we belong to Jesus. I have seen progressives taking swipes at conservatives and conservatives throwing punches at progressives. Mocking, scoffing and shaming have become our favorite tools. We point to Jesus and how he called out the Pharisees and Sadducees completely ignoring the fact that he rarely talked about them when they weren’t around, he primarily addressed them directly. We choose to hide behind our social media walls thinking that these platforms give us the authority to reshape our brothers and sisters in our image and forget that it’s not our image that matters. It is the image of God that matters, and how we interact with each other, while calling ourselves little Christs, shapes how image-bearers see Jesus. There’s nothing wrong in calling out sin, there’s nothing wrong in sharing our preferences, there’s nothing wrong in giving voice to our concerns and having disagreements. Paul seems to have been a font of disagreements, we know that he and Peter had some theological scuffles (in Galatians 2). We also know that Paul and Barnabus parted company (in Acts 15), not over ideological differences but over personal opinion. The beauty of these disagreements is that we see (in 2 Timothy 4:11) that the rift was healed. Paul and Barnabus differed in personal opinion but were united in the necessity of sharing the love of God. Their disagreement resulted in a doubling of the good news being spread. We can disagree but we have to approach each other with neighborly love, even if we don’t like each other. We don’t have record of Paul bad-mouthing Peter or Barnabus every where he went. We have no record of Barnabus creating anti-Paul followers. We have no record of these little anointed ones celebrating when their brothers floundered, but history will have these records of us. We seem to put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure that people know who we don’t like. It is high time for the little Christs to take a step back and make sure that we are being known by our love…for each other! We’re good at being known by our love for our platforms, projects and preferences but is that pointing lost-image-bearers to Jesus? If your delicate sensibilities are bothered by this then you are going to hate this next bit.

“You’ve heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

Matthew 5:43-48

We aren’t just commanded to love our brothers and sisters in Christ, we’re not just commanded to love our neighbors, we are commanded to love our enemies! Not only is it possible to love someone we don’t like, we are explicitly told we have to love people we don’t like. The most vile tyrants to ever walk the earth are still made in the image of God. This means I have to love and pray for people regardless of political stance, theology, behavior, religion etc. We have this horrible habit of looking at people as our enemies. We scream at the “opposition” through our megaphones. We carry our picket signs and we vilify those we view as being against us. We make our stands against people bearing the image of God completely neglecting Ephesians 6:12-13 which reminds us that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” I have seen a tendency to behave like Peter during the arrest of Jesus. He tries to win a spiritual battle with human weapons and ends up hacking off someone’s ear. We are trying to wrestle with flesh and blood thinking that it will change the outcome and we forget that we’re in the middle of God’s great plan. Could you imagine what would happen if instead of shouting at each other through our megaphones to try and win whatever battle we’re fighting, the children of God crossed the dividing lines we created and threw our arms around the lost image-bearers in front of us? Loving like Jesus loves us requires action. Loving requires us to lay down our lives for our friends, it requires us to love our enemies, it requires us to pray for the ones who are persecuting us. Loving requires us to remember that we don’t fight by earthly means, “the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.” 2 Corinthians 10:4

I’m not saying that we don’t hold convictions or that we embrace actions that violate the Word of God. I’m saying that as we walk out those convictions we do so through the lens of 1 Corinthians 13. We mostly use this for weddings and we usually start in verse 4 but when we’re talking about how we interact with people who bear the image of God, how we love the children of God, and even how we love our enemies we really need to start with verse 1.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant ⁵ or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶ it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸ Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. ¹¹ When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. ¹² For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

¹³ So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

The next time you’re about to go into the world, be it virtual or real, ask yourself how you are showing love. Are you Peter swinging wildly and chopping off ears? Are you rude or arrogant in how you’re sharing your thoughts? Are you insisting in your own way, irritable, resentful? Are your actions pointing to Jesus or are you just a noisy gong? I think that’s my biggest question for you today, especially when you are dealing with people you don’t like, are you loving them to Jesus? Honestly telling someone “I don’t like you, but I love you” is going to get you more traction than the most persuasive speeches. Especially, when that love is supported by actions that point image-bearers to the One in whose image they were created. Who knows, if we go around loving everyone, even those we find unlikeable, we might just find ourselves liking people a whole lot more.